Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Best Portable Retro Gaming Systems”.
What’S up folks how’s it going this watch hope you guys are all doing well. So if you may or may not know, i’m a huge fan of mini retro gaming consoles over the years, i’ve gathered quite a few of them – have a small, decent sized collection. But in this article we’re going to be talking about two of my absolute favorite handheld, slash mobile retro gaming solutions that are out there right now, specifically the retro flag, gpi case, coupled with the pi zero w and the rg 350.. Now, before we talk about what makes these two mobile devices uh fairly special, considering there are a decent number of other retro mobile emulators out there and before we get into that, i’m just going to briefly talk about skillshare our sponsor for this video that made this Whole thing possible in the first place now as we move it into a new decade with the year 2020.
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Lastly, if you click on the link in the description, you’ll get two months free premium membership to try out the service. I definitely recommend everybody to at least do that. I want to thank skillshare for sponsoring this video and making this content possible. Now, coming back to the topic at hand, let’s first talk about uh this thing over here now, as you can see, it’s pretty much an exact replica of the original, a game boy, a design that came out kind of in the early 90s late 80s – and this Is from a retro flag, they kind of specialize in making a really high quality raspberry pi at cases that look exactly like the classic gaming consoles.
We’Ve covered a lot of their cases on the channel before, and this is specifically the gpi case that came out mid 2019 and it’s based around the pi zero w model. It’S the smallest raspberry pi that you can get. We’Ve done a number of videos with this small raspberry pi stuffing inside a miniature ps1 uh case. Now.
Probably the coolest thing about this case is the fact that the pi zero, w being so small, actually gets installed inside the game cartridge itself, which is a standalone unit that you can take in and out. There’S a 40 pin uh connector that transfers some of the data display connections, there’s also a usb connection that you need to make, but you get still access to the sd card on the side and it’s a really really neat a design aspect that they came out With and very sleekly integrated now everything about the case itself is pretty much exact. One-To-One replica of the original gameboy, including the display which is 2.8 inches across, has a resolution of a 320 by 240, but it is an ips display, so the viewing angles are fantastic. It has the same dimensionality and weight of the original game boys and at the back of the device you can see that it’s even powered by three double a batteries which is really cool. Uh, there’s also a switch on the top of the device. So you can turn on and off uh the unit uh. With that switch, you do need to run a safe shutdown, a script for the raspberry pi, but that’s super easy to do. Furthermore, since we’re using the raspberry pi platform, it’s probably best uh to run a retropie which is uh, probably the most popular emulation platform for the raspberry pi, and it’s super simple to install. You can pretty much get this thing set up within half an hour or so and load up your favorite roms, i’m using a skin that replicates the game. Boy advance theme called a gb z35, it’s better optimized for this smaller display and in terms of what games you can emulate on. This thing is pretty much limited by the power of the raspberry pi zero w. So that means games from the atari 2600 era.
Nes snes, sega, mega drive or genesis all run are pretty much fine on the specific platform. The cool thing is at the back: there’s also some bumpers or shoulder buttons called the l and r buttons. So you can play uh some of those snes games. If you map those buttons accordingly and in terms of the actual button feel for the main controls, the xy and the d-pad start select, they feel exactly the same as the original nintendo game boy, which is really amazing. And it’s definitely going to bring a lot of good memories for people that played the original gameboy when they were a kid. Other things to note is you do also have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack volume, dial and a pretty decent speaker as well now move forward. Let’S talk about the more powerful, slash, more quote-unquote, serious retro, handheld gaming console, and that is the rg 350, also known as the retro game. A 350 there’s a lot of manufacturers that make this device.
This specific one is from amber nick and it has a three and a half inch ips display with a resolution of 320 by 240., we have a jz 4770 cp, which is a single core processor clocked in a one gigahertz. We have 512 megabytes of ddr2 memory as well as 16 gigabytes of internal uh storage, since there is an internal sd card in addition to the built-in external sd card slot, that’s located at the bottom of the device, and we also have a built-in 2500 milliamp hour Battery the button layout is fairly similar to the nintendo switch light, so we have full size, dual analog, thumbsticks asymmetrical in order. We have a d-pad as well as a b x y buttons start select, as well as two sets of bumpers or shoulder buttons located on the top portion of the device. There’S also built-in rumble capacity and there’s a decent amount of connectivity options at the top. You have two usb c connections: a 3.5 millimeter headphone or av output connection, as well as something that i wish the new nintendo switch light had, which is a mini, hdmi connection. If you want to output the display to a larger, monitor or tv now, the firmware that runs on this thing is very customizable. It’S fairly versatile in terms of the amount of emulators that are already available and there’s a thriving community behind this device.
That’S expanding the capabilities of this thing on a fairly frequent at basis. Right now, you can emulate all of the classic gaming titles that you would find in the 70s 80s, all the way to the mid 90s, and this is an excellent platform for emulating playstation 1 games. In fact, it does a better job of running those games than the classic playstation console that we took a look at a while back and for the most part, the experience was very fluid. Well, around 60 frames per second on most of the titles that i experienced. Whether that was tekken 3 marvel superheroes versus street fighter and even the gran turismo 2 series now beyond just a playstation 1. You can also play some early 90s pc games, such as doom, as well as quake one and two and uh most of those games are run pretty flawlessly, although they don’t really work with the analog thumbsticks all too well, but they are playable and nonetheless. Furthermore, there’s also an n64 emulator, that’s uh in the alpha stages right now, uh most of the games that i’ve tested uh run pretty terribly.
The render output is very poor. I’Ve sluggish frame rates, choppy audio and really not a good playable experience, but if they can optimize the emulator a little bit further, perhaps we can get a little bit better of an experience, but right now, n64 emulation is possible, but definitely not enjoyable. On the rg 350, but when it comes to emulating games playstation, one and older – definitely not a problem here, and i definitely think that this is the more versatile a little bit more pocket friendly. A mobile gaming experience that’s available out there and i would even put it slightly above the capabilities of the gpi case, which is again limited by the raspberry pi uh zero architecture, which is not going to be too powerful, you’re, definitely not going to play.
Playstation 1 games on there and you don’t have analog thumbsticks for that anyways. So this is definitely the more versatile experience and probably going to give you a little bit of value, because you can pick these up for around 80 to ninety dollars versus uh. The uh gpi case from retro flag is sixty nine dollars. Then you need to get uh an sd card batteries as well as the pi zero w as well.
So you probably can look at around a hundred dollars if you wan na, go for a bundle or something like that check out the description down below. If you do want links to any of these products and if you go through any of those links uh, it does help support the channel and we definitely appreciate all your guys support. But i definitely want to know what you guys think is the best uh handheld gaming console for the retro emulating uh platforms that are available right now. Obviously we have the new nintendo switch. We have the nintendo switch itself and there is some emulating uh potential. Obviously, in them, but they’re, pretty locked down at devices versus these are fairly open source and uh.
Hopefully, they’re gon na get better as we go into 2020, with even better hardware and even better emulating platforms, because definitely a big fan of this space uh, especially for uh kind of replicating the uh late 90s early 2000 gaming world, i think, is going to be Really cool in the mobile space, so hopefully we’re going to get some new hardware coming out and we’ll be on looking out for consoles. That can do that. So we’re talking about early xbox, playstation 2 as well as n64, and all that stuff and dreamcast, of course.
But besides that guys that’s right. I definitely want to give you guys a huge shout out for making all this stuff possible for supporting the channel and a big shout out to skillshare for again supporting us as well check out the description down below for more details. About everything we talked about and we’ll see you real soon take care.
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